Here I am, once again, trying to make ourselves heard by the great powers ahead of our game, hoping to save them from their disconnection from the real world.
Warmode was advertised as one of the biggest changes for BfA, but as devs say themselves, it’s not working as intended. Most players turn it on while leveling their characters and turn it off the moment they hit max level. A change was announced, increasing it’s bonus to 30% for the underrepresented faction, but that won’t change anything at all. Let’s do a breakdown to understand what’s wrong and why this change is meaningless.
Why people turn Warmode off?
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They don’t enjoy world pvp at all - kinda hard to change this.
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They are ok with world pvp, but being overwhelmed by the enemy faction makes doing WQs so painful that the bonus doesn’t pay off - these are the ones you are targeting.
Who has warmode on?
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People who enjoy world pvp and would have it on regardless of the bonus.
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Those who are leveling their characters.
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Those whose faction is the dominant one in their server/group - aka those who have nothing to lose by having it on.
I think it’s safe to say that, except for those leveling alts, no one turns warmode on for its bonus.
Why the warmode bonus isn’t appealing enough for max level characters?
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The cruel truth is, no one does world quests or emissaries for fun. They are NOT fun, save for a few exceptions. We do them for the rewards only. And to decide if they are worth our time (most people dont have many hours to play every night due to family/work), we try to balance their cost benefit ratio. Having warmode on may make our route jump from a couple minutes to a lot longer, or even become undoable (when the enemy faction camps a WQ location), what makes them unworthy.
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The Warmode bonus only affects gold and war resources rewards; they dont affect item rewards, azerite caches or even the emissary cache.
On top of that, boat missions are pointless and can be totally ignored once you are exalted with all your factions (the worthless paragon rewards won’t change this either), what makes war resources farming pointless. At this point, we only spend WRs on azerite missions. We can get around 1k once our faction gets Arathi and those shall be enough until we get Arathi back. So, increasing the war resources by 10%, 30% or even 100% won’t matter.
About gold rewards: open you world map in zandalar/kul tiraz, and mouse over the gold reward WQs. You will see values from 60-89 gold. Now, go to Broken Shore and check the gold reward WQs from Legion. Every gold WQ from Legion gives you MORE gold than BfA ones. What brings us to my point here: the gold awarded is no where near enough the pain of being ganked for countless minutes. The bonus or the base value would need to be A LOT higher.
In the end, the only “meaningful” reward from having warmode on and engaging into world pvp are… honor points. Now, I have yet to find someone who cares about those. In BfA, it’s all about Conquest. -
Regardless of rewards, no one enjoys having their bums handed to themselves (in game, at least). We launch the game to have fun and unload stress, and not to have extra frustration. And let me tell you, being ganked over and over 10 to 1, without any means to fight back, is frustration in it’s purest form.
TL;DR: the current WQ rewards impacted by WM are too low or meaningless. Increasing them by 30% is nowhere near enough. Make their base values worth our time. Add being ganked over and over on top of that, and you have why we don’t care about warmode.
So, how to make Warmode worth it? How to make max level players keep it on?
Obviously, these are toward those of the underrepresented faction. And before you say “you mean alliance”, there are servers where alliance is the dominant one.
There are only 2 ways to make Warmode escapes Ashran’s fate, of being the failure (or the main one) of this expansion: you can either give the outnumbered a chance to fight back, or make Warmode itself an interesting gaming option. Or both ![:slight_smile:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/slight_smile.png?v=6" ":slight_smile:")
Option 1: Fix the unbalance
Give the outnumbered players a chance to fight back. You can accomplish this by giving them a boost in power (something like what we had in ICC), allow them to summon elite patrols to aid in combat or giving the stronger faction a debuff in power.
As long as people think it’s a fair fight, a considerable number of people may turn it on.
Option 2: make Warmode worth it
If we are going to have our bums handed to ourselves, it better be worth the pain:
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Make enemy player kills award conquest points. This would be great for catching up on alts. But again, it should be a decent amount, like 10 or 15 points per kill. This bonus could be increased while not in a raid group. Maybe, get random marks of honor and pvp armor/weapons every X kills in a row. I mean, isn’t it pvp after all?
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Make the bonus affect emissaries caches and item rewards - like bonus ilvl, bonus chance to warforge/titanforge, greater number of herbs/ore, etc.
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Make the bonus a buff that would also work in BGs/Dungeons - Every X minutes being active in open world with WM on would give you the same bonus for Y minutes in closed world environments - persisting through death. The buff would increase gold, experience and item drops rate/quantity.
Alas, the last incoming change is a disaster. Being able to toggle warmode in any resting zone will not bring more people into WM - it will be the absolute opposite. Leveling players will be able to do all their quests with WM off, hearth back to their quest hub and turn it on only for turning the quests in. We will lose a bunch of the few who still have it on - those leveling alts.
Please, if you have more suggestions that could help fix Warmode, feel free to share them.